“Neither leave here, nor die here, but really live here”

Abstract

No other Mediterranean area has been marked for so long by environmental conflicts as the coastal strip between Fos‑sur‑Mer and the banks of the Etang‑de-Berre. Regular individual and collective demonstrations have taken place for more than two hundred years, some violent, structured and recurring, others less so, to draw the attention of the public authorities to the risks and nuisances from the industrial boom. The purpose of this article is to intersect the sociological and historical perspectives with a triple goal: 1. understand better the efforts made by host societies to withstand successive, diverse and dense industrial pollution; 2. identify the various characteristics of a long-term and frequently unequal balance of power; 3. attempt to highlight common features and changes in how this type of conflict is conducted. It relates the story of a dispossession and the several ways in which it occurred, often violently: appropriation of communal spaces, setting up barriers or bans around industrial facilities or capturing and degrading local environmental resources and assets. It highlights symmetrically the resistance of affected populations in protesting and demanding more salubrious living conditions or their rights to access and use the land snatched from them.